Equinox Sky Camp—

This includes free eve-

ning viewing. Doors

WAC News—

Welcome all to the Public Open Night 2016 by the WAC. Hopefully it is clear and there is great viewing! In the meanwhile, I have been researching a new talk for a local high school who wish to cover the prospects of human habitation beyond Earth. Quite an interesting and thought provoking topic considering the current technological advancement and the shift from public to private funding of space exploration. One of the more intriguing topics is the problem of dust. With all the research and funding poured into trying to protect equipment and astronauts, this remains unsolved. As I like to say ‘It is a dusty Universe’! Another fascinating step currently being worked on by NASA is the Asteroid Retdirect Mission. This objective really caught me by sur-prise but the more I looked into it, the more technological and contamina-t ion sense i t makes . You can read more at : https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/initiative/index.html

Until next month~SK

www.weymouthastronomy.co.uk

Sky Watcher

The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe By Ethan Siegel

Our greatest, largest-scale surveys of the universe have given us an unprecedented view of cosmic structure extending for tens of billions of light years. With the combined effects of normal matter, dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos and radiation all affecting how matter clumps, collapses and separates over time, the great cosmic web we see is in tremendous agreement with our best theories: the Big Bang and General Relativity. Yet this understanding was only possible because of the pioneer-ing work of Edwin Hubble, who identified a large number of galaxies outside of our own, correctly measured their distance (following the work of Vesto Slipher's work measuring their redshifts), and discovered

the expanding universe.

But what if the Milky Way weren't located in one of the "strands" of the great cosmic

Volume 10, Issue 10 12 February 2016 Trips / Events

Ideas for trips and events

always welcome!

events@weymouthastronomy.co.uk

WAC Upcoming Events:

11 Mar—Calendars, Clocks and

Cultures—James Fradgley

8 Apr—Exoplanets—Don

Pollacco [8pm start]

13 May—The Names of Stars—

Bob Mizon

10 June—Ask the Experts!

8 July—Movie: How the Universe

Works

More to come!

Plans for informal viewing nights

will take place after the monthly

meetings, weather permitting.

17 Feb CADAS—A life on

Mars—Bud Budzynski

1 Mar WAS—Apollo

Science Packages—Keith

Wright

16 Mar CADAS—Dawn of

the Solar System—Chris

Starr

5 Apr WAS—Eclipses—

Chris Bowden

20 Apr CADAS—Names in

the Sky—Bob Mizon

3 May WAS—Images of the

Universe Vol 2—Paul

Money

18 May CADAS—Surface

features of the Moon—

Barry Fitzgerald

If you are interested in giving

a talk or workshop, let the

organisers know. They like

to offer new titles in their

programme line-up.

More events to come!!

web, where galaxies are plentiful and ubiquitous in many different directions? What if, instead, we were located in one of the great "voids" separating the vast majority of galaxies? It would've taken telescopes and imaging technology far more advanced than Hubble had at his disposal to even detect a single galaxy beyond our own, much less dozens, hundreds or millions, like we have today. While the nearest galaxies to us are only a few million light years distant, there are voids so large that a galaxy located at the center of one might not see another for a

hundred times that distance.

While we've readily learned about our place in the universe from observing what's around us, not everyone is as fortunate. In particular, the galaxy MCG+01-02-015 has not a single known

galaxy around it for a hundred million light years in all directions. Were you to draw a sphere around the Milky Way with a radius of 100 million light years, we'd find hundreds of thousands of galaxies. But not MCG+01-02-015; it's the loneliest galaxy ever discov-ered. Our Milky Way, like most

Asteroid Redirect Mission

galaxies, has been built up by mergers and accretions of many other galaxies over billions of years, having acquired stars and gas from a slew of our former neighbors. But an isolated galaxy like this one has only the matter it was born with to call its own. Edwin Hubble made

his universe-changing discovery using telescope technology from 1917, yet he would have found absolutely zero other galaxies at all were we situated at MCG+01-02-015's location. The first visible galaxy wouldn't have shown up until we had 1960s-level technology, and who knows if we'd have continued looking? If we were such a lonely galaxy, would we have given up the search, and concluded that our galaxy encompassed all of existence? Or would we have continued peering deeper into the void, eventually discovering our unusual location in a vast, expanding universe? For the inhabitants of the loneliest galaxy, we can only hope that they didn't give up the search, and discovered the entire

universe.

www.weymouthastronomy.co.uk

Galaxy (continued)

Sky Watcher

Volume 10, Issue 10

Page 2

Steven K. Blau

The unexpectedly similar orbits of six distant objects could result from the gravity of an as yet unseen mass.

Before they were discovered, Neptune and Pluto were conjectured to explain discrepancies between planetary orbits and Newtonian expectations. Now a pair of astronomers from Caltech, theorist Konstantin Batygin and observer Michael Brown, have proposed that our solar system includes a new planet. But Planet Nine, as they call it, doesn’t explain small orbital perturbations; instead it accounts for unlikely similarities in the orbits of six objects, among them the minor planet Sedna, located far away in the Kuiper Belt. The figure shows those orbits in purple; the length of Sedna’s semimajor axis is about 500 AU (Earth–Sun radii); Pluto’s is 40 AU. For all six, the semi major axis points in about the same

direction, and all six orbits are inclined by 30° or so with respect to Earth’s orbit. Having calculated that the likelihood of such a coincidence is 0.007%, Batygin and Brown explored the possibility of a gravitational mechanism to shepherd the Kuiper Belt objects into their similar paths. Analytical calculations and N-body simulations established that Planet Nine could plausibly account for the similarities, provided it is at least 10 times as massive as Earth and orbits in the plane of the six objects along the trajectory illustrated in yellow. Surprisingly, the theoretical work also implied that some Kuiper Belt denizens have orbits nearly perpendicular to Earth’s. Five such bodies have been spotted. The Caltech model is silent as to where the putative Planet Nine currently lies on its 10-millennium journey around the Sun. If it’s not too close to its aphelion, telescopes should have already spotted it, and it might be in old, overlooked data. At aphelion, the biggest telescopes on Earth could still spot it. (K. Batygin, M. E. Brown, Astronom. J. 151, 22,

2016).

Feature Image: Planetary Conjunction over Weymouth Bay—3 Feb 2016

A Giant Planet in the Kuiper Belt

WAC member John Gifford sent in this gorgeous panoramic of the five planet conjunction. Keep watching before dawn to see how the planets move

along the zodiac.

Skymap: spaceweather.com